Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

105to haunting. According to him, “only the name can inherit, and this is why the name, to bedistinguished from the bearer, is always and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death”(“Otobiographies” 7). Pue, the initial signature of the narrative, and a name that alludes to deathand history “is the name of someone dead or, of a living someone whom it can do without”(“Roundtable on translation” 53). I am writing this paper for the dead, for Hawthorne. My name,the initial signature of the chapter, spectrally refers to the initiary, initial nameHawthorne’sghost. I am dead and my chapter is initiated by the dead. Hawthorne is writing The Scarlet Letterfor the dead Pue, for America. Furnished with ghosts that ask to be remembered and written intothe American history, Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” functions as an exercise in melancholia.“The Custom-House” inhabits the liminal space between mourning and melancholia.Settling the act of mourning cannot happen without the painful act of traversing melancholia.This shift, Eric Savoy argues, “is from mourning to an altogether productive melancholia thatgenerates a Gothic scene of writing: this book of the dead can be addressed only to the dead in atropic moment that constitutes the narrative that follows as an extended prosopopeia that accruesunder a shadowy address” (461). Does the author/narrator fail to mourn the lost object?Hawthorne can be considered as a melancholic subject. Part of his ego is identified with the lostobject of desirethe dead Father. Because of the identification of the ego with lost object ofdesire, the “object-loss [is] transformed into ego-loss” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 249).Unlike normal mourning, 34 in melancholia the lost object is not relinquished in the fullness ofgrieving time. Instead, the mourning ego splits and identifies with the lost object to support theflow of libido towards that object. Studying Freud’s model of melancholia, Abraham and Torokpropose that this process be renamed a process of encryption, one’s psychic encrypment of the